#MustRead Dropping invisible dye on migrants? Blaring barking dogs? Tech initiatives to survey the southern border have a long history — some more successful than others. The area includes 12,000 underground motion sensors, long-range radars and Predator B drones that can find footprints in the sand — and the latest budget deal promised another $400 million in funding for border technology.

Silicon Valley is looking to cash in on the border boom, reports Bloomberg Businessweek in a detailed analysis of the industry. Among those interested is Peter Thiel, the PayPal billionaire, who has raised money for a virtual wall startup called Anduril Industries, after a powerful sword in The Lord of the Rings.

But it’s unlikely these high-tech solutions will be effective. “For all its promise, surveillance technology has become a Bermuda Triangle for border security,” write Lauren Etter and Karen Weise. “The government has devoted a half-century and billions of dollars to creating a virtual wall, but political leaders, America’s biggest companies, and laboratories filled with rocket scientists have failed to deliver one that works.”

The story does note one place high-tech surveillance has succeeded: Israel. In its smart fence, “data points picked up by the sensors, such as changes in magnetic fields, temperature, and vibrations, are fed into an algorithm that’s grown advanced enough to distinguish between an intruder and an animal or a bush shaking in the wind.”

California initially held out, but approved a limited deployment Wednesday which will not enforce immigration laws, among other provisions. Governor Brown wrote in a letter to Trump, “This will not be a mission to build a new wall. It will not be a mission to round up women and children or detain people escaping violence and seeking a better life.”

Deportation and Family SeparationA 16-year-old girl, born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants, is facing a choice that feels impossible: living with her parents in a country she barely knows, or leaving her family to pursue a life in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “There are thousands of kids like her in Mexico — U.S. citizen children of undocumented parents who have been deported, who are struggling to adapt to a country they don’t quite know, a language they don’t quite speak and people who often regard them as oddities,” writes Kevin Sullivan for The Washington Post.

In Dallas, Dianne Solis looks at the U.S. citizens children left behind after their parents were deported. “Everyone from parents to school officials, medical personnel and parish priests are focusing on how to prepare these citizen children for the deportation of a parent not here lawfully,” Solis writes in the Dallas Morning News. “There are nearly 5 million children in the U.S with a parent who is here illegally, according to the Pew Research Center.”

Detention and Sexual AbuseTwo years ago the Intercept filed a Freedom of Information Act request to ICE to release reports of sexual abuse in agency custody. They never received a response. The DHS Office of Inspector General responded nearly two years later, sharing 1,224 complaints submitted between 2010 and 2017. They provided documentation of investigations of just 2 percent of them. “The sheer number of complaints — despite serious obstacles in the path of those filing them, as well as the patterns they reveal about mistreatment in facilities nationwide — suggest that sexual assault and harassment in immigration detention are not only widespread but systemic, and enabled by an agency that regularly fails to hold itself accountable,” Alice Speri writes.

JusticeThe Justice Department will suspend a legal assistance program for people facing deportation, ostensibly to review the program’s efficacy, reports The Washington Post. The Legal Orientation Program, created in 2003 by the George W. Bush administration so court proceedings would move more smoothly, held information sessions for more than 500,000 detained immigrants last year and was one of the few ways to access legal advice in a court system that doesn’t provide representation. The program is administered by the Vera Institute of Justice and a network of 18 other nonprofits.

“This is a blatant attempt by the administration to strip detained immigrants of even the pretense of due-process rights,” said the director of one of the organizations that provides representation. A court official maintained they are protected, telling Maria Sacchetti “that immigration judges are already required to inform immigrants of their rights before a hearing, including their right to find a lawyer at their own expense.”

The Vera Institute said a 2012 study by the Justice Department concluded that the program saved the government nearly $18 million over one year.

The move comes during a push for the immigration court system to move more quickly. The union for immigration judges says Sessions’ plan to enforce quotas in immigration courts will not only further strain an already overburdened system but undermine its credibility. “Petitioners will wonder if a judge’s decision is based on merit or if they’re just trying to meet a quota or deadline,” said the president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.

Up Against the Wall, by Edward S. Casey and Mary Watkins, uses the U.S.-Mexico border to look at the many walls, both literal and metaphorical, being built to police divisions. It won the Ethnic Studies (NAES) Outstanding Book of the Year award in 2017.

*Daniela Gerson is an assistant professor at California State University, Northridge with a focus on community, ethnic, and participatory media. She is also a senior fellow at the Democracy Fund. Before that she was a community engagement editor at the LA Times; founding editor of a trilingual hyperlocal publication, Alhambra Source; staff immigration reporter for the New York Sun; and a contributor to outlets including WNYC: New York Public Radio, The World, Der Spiegel, Financial Times, CNN, and The New York Times. She recently wrote How can collaborations between ethnic and mainstream outlets serve communities in the digital age? for American Press Institute. You can find her on Twitter @dhgerson

*Elizabeth Aguilera is a multimedia reporter for CALmatters covering health and social services, including immigration. Previously she reported on community health, for Southern California Public Radio. She’s also reported on immigration for the San Diego Union-Tribune, where she won a Best of the West award for her work on sex trafficking between the U.S. and Mexico; and before that she covered a variety of beats and issues for the Denver Post including urban affairs and immigration. Her latest story is Single-payer health care: what Californians need to know. You can find her on Twitter @1eaguilera

*Yana Kunichoff is an independent journalist and documentary producer who covers immigration, policing, education and social movements. She was project manager for Migrahack 2016 in Chicago. She has also produced feature-length documentaries and a pop-culture web series for Scrappers Film Group; worked as a fellow with City Bureau, where she won a March 2016 Sidney Hillman award for an investigation into fatal police shootings; and covered race and poverty issues for the Chicago Reporter. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, Pacific Standard and Chicago magazine among others. You can find her on Twitter @yanazure